After a night of fear and air raid sirens, the Tel Aviv boardwalk was again a site for swimming and strolling. Photo: David Saranga - Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2010) Source: Supplied

THE only thing on people's minds yesterday morning in Tel Aviv was when the next attack might come.

The city woke to blue skies over the Mediterranean. People were swimming and strolling along the boardwalk where only the night before an Iranian-made Fadja rocket had screamed over the ancient historic port of Jaffa.

Locals argued whether it had landed in the water or been taken out by the city's missile defence system, the Iron Dome. Another had landed, striking in the heart of Tel Aviv's southern suburbs. No one was hurt - purely by luck.

It took just 10 minutes for the skies over southern Tel Aviv to light up after air raid sirens echoed across the city shortly before 7pm on Thursday.

It was the first time in 20 years that the city had come under attack - during the first Gulf War Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at Israel.

We heard it as we sat in a conference room on the 16th floor of a Tel Aviv hotel being briefed by our Israeli fixer. We were shuffled out of the room into the corridor in the middle of the building and told to stay away from the windows.

Three minutes later we felt the thud as the rocket hit. I raced downstairs to a fellow journalist's room which faced south towards Gaza, 80km away. That's how far the rocket had flown.

We could see the streaming orange missiles from the mobile anti-rocket batteries launch low into the air to intercept other incoming rockets.

Yesterday, at 1.34pm, the air raid siren sounded for a second time in 24 hours across Tel Aviv. Another Fadja rocket landed - this time 300 metres off the beach in front of a hotel.

Hundreds of people on the beach moved for cover when they heard the thud and the splash in the water.

Within minutes they had returned to the water as if nothing had happened.

But the rules of conflict between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory of Gaza have changed.

Only two days earlier we had been in the towns of Sderot and Be'er Sheva bordering Gaza, where residents were forced into bomb shelters and schools were closed indefinitely. They have lived under the threat of rocket fire for the past four days.

We had been there by accident when the Israel Defence Force launched its missile strike into Gaza - home to 1.5 million Palestinians. The strike was aimed to assassinate the Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jaabari in response to an attack a week earlier on four Israeli soldiers.

We drove west into the desert to get out of rocket range as warnings came from the Australian Embassy that a retaliatory Hamas attack was imminent.

That night, hundreds rained down. With the country's second-largest city Tel Aviv now under attack, people here were in no doubt full-scale war was a possibility. Locals had no doubt that ground troops would be sent into Gaza if another rocket hit Tel Aviv.

"Am I worried? A little," said a waiter at the hotel still serving drinks to nervous guests well into Thursday night. "But I trust our army to look after us."

To get a scale of what is unfolding in this sliver of a country bordered by hostile neighbours, it would be like Ultimo declaring war on Woolloomooloo - or launching an attack on Melbourne's CBD from Albert Park. That is the distance between the southern Israeli border towns and Gaza.

It takes just five hours to drive from one end of the country to the other.

We had flown to the Golan Heights on Thursday. From the windows of the light plane at just 2000ft, we could see from one side of the country to the other. Jordan and the West Bank to the east, Syria and Lebanon to the north and the shining blue Mediterranean to the west. And that is Israel's problem.

Palestinian affairs expert and Jerusalem-based journalist Khaled Abu Toumi said the rocket attacks showed that no place in Israel was safe.

"This has changed the rules of the game ... the fact they hit Tel Aviv is a symbolic victory for Hamas," he said.

"Now it becomes an issue of if one of those rockets hits Tel Aviv again and people are killed. What will be the response?"

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